The Nanyang as a Pluriverse: Stateless Poetics and the Diasporic Local in Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian Literatures

Abstract The emergence of a cohort of Malaysia-born writers producing works in English from metropolitan centres in the West alongside a growing body of Mahua (or Malaysian Chinese) literature, whose practitioners are ethnic Chinese based primarily in Taiwan and writing in Chinese, constitutes two principal trajectories in contemporary Malaysian literature. Yet, comparative discussions between Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literatures remain scarce. This paper seeks to address this gap by proposing the Nanyang (literally, the “South Seas”) as a decolonial framework that reveals how these literatures delink from colonial legacies and state-centric imaginaries while enacting epistemic disobedience through pluriversal engagement. The Nanyang as a pluriverse does not merely entail the coexistence of these distinct literary traditions but emerges as a non-hierarchical space of convergence for Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysia, both in the literary worlds constructed by their authors and the cultural spaces they inhabit. By examining Tash Aw and Ng Kim Chew as exemplars of Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literary trajectories, respectively, this paper illustrates how these marginalised literary traditions converge through complex negotiations of nationalist, global, and diasporic hegemonies, reimagining the Nanyang as a pluriverse of routes and relationality. This reframing also positions the Nanyang as a site of “stateless poetics” and the “diasporic local,” concepts that challenge institutionalised paradigms of Malaysian literary and cultural production, which continue to marginalise non-Malay linguistic traditions. The paper concludes by gesturing to other Southeast Asian littoral imaginaries to support ongoing Global South dialogues on relationality, plurilingualism, and decolonial aesthetics.